Hospitals and other care facilities face many challenges surrounding the preparation, use, and wasting of injectable drugs. For instance each year many preventable adverse drug events involving harmful medication errors are caused by injectable drugs. Acute care facilities, such as hospitals, emergency departments, patient cancer clinics, urgent care centers, and some long-term-care hospitals and facilities, account for many of these adverse drug events. Most injectable medication errors occur at the administration stage. These errors include, for instance, administering the incorrect drug (which can be cause by improperly labeling a drug or administering the drug to the wrong patient), administering the incorrect drug dose, administering a drug having an incorrect drug concentration (this can include a fluid having a drug that has not been mixed properly), administering an expired or contaminated drug, incorrectly administering a second dose of a drug, administering the drug at the wrong rate, and administering a drug at a wrong time. Such medication errors are particularly challenging because they can be difficult or impossible for some care facilities to detect.
Another challenge presented to care facilities is a growing concern of drug diversions and drug abuse within these facilities. Recent reports have stated that the use of narcotics within the hospital is becoming an increasing problem. In an effort to avoid drug diversions, some hospitals and other care facilities have protocols in place that require one person to dispose or waste the narcotic (such as into a sink or a container) while another person watches to ensure the narcotic was indeed wasted. There are inherent problems with this method. For example, the drug could be substituted prior to wasting without the observer knowing, the waster and observer could be diverting the drug together, or the observer ignores the problem for professional or personal reasons.
In light of the high rate of harmful medication errors, drug diversions, and drug abuse that occur despite current practices and technologies, it would be beneficial to develop systems and methods that can be used by care facilities to further reduce the occurrence of these adverse events.